Monthly Lessons Archive 2018

LIFE WITH A CAPITAL “L”
     Refuse to think of what you are going to do tomorrow. Decide that you are never again going to guarantee your future. Instead, you are going to sacrifice thinking about tomorrow regardless of what happens to you. Have the courage to not think what you always think. Set aside your plans, supports and securities.
     You are simply not going to do, think, plan anything for tomorrow. You've made the decision to live without them — plans, supports, thoughts, and worries. This allows something else to enter. This is sacrificing your usual life in order to find life with a capital “L.”
     Refuse to think in time anymore — past or future. You don't know what an adventure you have in store if you do it! As you see the futility in thinking those thoughts again and again, it becomes easier and easier not to.
     God does the work for you when you allow it. Dare to let him work it out for you.

JUST BE PASSIVE
     Life works in a different way than you imagine. Don't fight what life brings. That's the same as to remember to be passive, not negative.
     So things don't go your way. Just be passive. Do you know what you're doing then? You are dying to the old nature that wants to destroy you. Go to work.

THE DAMAGE CAN BE UNDONE
     You are under constant and vicious attack. There is no moment in your entire life when you have not been under vicious attack. You were not aware of it while the assault was hurling its bombs at you because you convinced yourself at the moment of the attack that you were having a good time, that more money was coming in, or someone said something nice about you, or a new and exciting plan for finding something to do with yourself came to you.
     And so, you very slyly suggested to yourself, “Aha, I was pained yesterday all right. I was under attack all right, by those anxieties and by those people, but today is different. Today I have some place to travel to, either physically or in my mind and imagination. Today is going to be nice because I have a productive and exciting activity, even if it's only a mental journey to the past or to the future.”
     Now you have your first clue as to who the enemy really is. Your first enemy is unconsciousness of the enemy. Your life is shallow, singing bright cheerful songs, putting on the proper smiles and facial expressions, making sure that other people know how busy and successful and productive you are. You always have to have an audience and because you can't convince yourself, you try to convince someone else. Neither will work.
     Now I have marvelous news for you this morning, and the first strange part of it is it's something your friends and neighbors and society as a whole do not want. Now listen, listen to this good news that almost nobody wants. The good news is this, in the simplest language that it could be phrased, the damage can be undone.

TELL THE TRUTH
     Tell the truth by saying, “Yes, I have a hot burning mind that tortures me all day long.” If you did that much you’d be obeying the will of Heaven instead of the imposter-self.

ALLOW BADNESS TO BE DESTROYED
     The deliberate invitation to allow badness to be destroyed within is one of the first small preliminary signs that you, as a wanderer of the path, have decided to decide all over again to allow the destruction of the phony belief in the supremacy of your ways and choices.
     You’re going against not just the whole world of wickedness; you’re not just going against that. You’re going against everything you have labeled as good for me. “That boyfriend is good for me.” You haven’t the slightest notion of what is good for you. You only know what is bad for you, and you call it good. That’s the wrong path.
     I’m telling you, face the fact I just gave you. That everything in this world is against you waking up. Everything is working against it, everyone you know. The lies hurled at you since you were a little kid, the lies which were intended to keep you getting worse and worse, the lies are numbered by the trillions. Don’t fall in love with being lost! That’s taking one of the wrong roads.
     You listen to the way I state it; it will help you. Right now, tonight, you will give attention to falling out of love with being sad, with thinking you have to figure things out. You can’t figure things out! Don’t be afraid to face that.

STOP GLORIFYING SUFFERING
    Q: The persistence of mental suffering baffles me. How can mental pain come to an end?
    A: Stop glorifying suffering. It has no glory. Not an ounce. Drop the secret and foolish self-glory in suffering and you will see it fall off like a dropped hat.

HOW TO END SUFFERING
     We don't want to see our suffering. We want to hide from it, which is why it continues. You'll understand what you’re hearing maybe thirty years from now.
     When someone makes some kind of a sour, frightening remark about anything whatever, I want you to notice how you immediately take it as a necessity for you to start worrying and — this is the most important point — for you to start thinking about it and to chatter with them about.
     “Oh, maybe sugar cane will go up,” for example. See, you start chattering with them about it. You watch how you immediately get dragged into the trap. And it's happened to all of you in this room a dozen times today already.
     But you watch your reaction, how anyone can say anything — about the market maybe — blab, blab, blab! You could have had your mind to yourself. You could have kept your spirit to yourself but you fell into their evil trap — evil being unconsciousness, evil being fakery, being pretense.
     When you start to get normal in even a small way, the world will call that normality abnormal.
     Exercise: Answer YES or NO. This helps you understand your own mind. Mental blabber-mouthery prevents understanding.

WHO ARE YOU TRYING TO KID?
     Negative emotions are very clever in disguising themselves as necessary, as essential to our psychic survival. Say, "Who are you trying to kid? God, please empower this statement." Negative emotions have no power of their own. They are a hoax. Take everything in consciously.

THE WAY OUT
     When you begin to see that you have created your world in your own image, it will shock you. Here is an exercise for you. When you are pained, I can’t begin to tell you what a marvelous change this will make in your life. Every time you feel pain, agony, hurt, instead of thinking about the pain, which you now do, you will do something else. When you think about it your attention is directed toward the pain.
     From now on, each and every time you feel a pain, a disappointment, a hurt of any kind, instead of thinking about the pain, you are going to think about something else. You are going to think, “I don’t understand the pain. Just think, there is a demon there, something that is lashing at me.” And it hurts, doesn’t it? But you are not going to get a false pleasure from the pain. You are going to go to the right department and say, “I don’t understand that pain.” That’s it! Then you never have to think another thought about the agony you are experiencing. You are through. You have done your part. I HAVE GIVEN YOU THE WAY OUT.
     God himself has just come to your rescue. This is what is authentically religious. God himself says, Don’t think about and swim around in the pain. Simply sit back in your chair, relax and say, “I don’t understand the anguish that is terrorizing my system.” If you don't understand it, there is nothing you can do, is there? Do nothing.
     When you complain and cry and moan and groan and think “How did I get into this mess?” etc., nothing will change. With this exercise, you are putting yourself in an entirely different department and you will get the products that that department has ready for you.
     Do you want the product of not having to make worried decisions all day long? Just say, “I don't understand that crisis that came up.” And stop. Go through your whole day not understanding it.
     It is your spurious understanding that got you in your inner mess. Don't be afraid to have no intelligence of your own. God is willing to make the grand magnificent substitute for you. God gives you his life in exchange for your life.
     The majority of people sell their souls to the devil all day long. If you are willing to say, “I don't understand anything at all about my life,” your false understanding will fall away and in its place will be the insight from Heaven itself. That insight from a very high place is all you need for this world and the next world.

SILENCE IS THE ONLY ANSWER
     Question: Who am I? You don't know you ask that question.
     Answer:  Silence is the only answer there is. You don’t want the silence to be there because if it is, then you can’t be there. God speaks to you in silence. If you would allow the silence to be there, which can be done, you would know who you are. And it wouldn’t be from thought.
     “God, please show me how to submit to your silence.”

LET TRUTH HANDLE IT
     Remember the word self-responsibility and know that spiritually, it means much more than you can possibly conceive right now. Your first responsibility is to see that you can't do anything for yourself. This will be a great crisis for you because having abandoned yourself and not yet knowing God, you feel as if you're plunging down into a pit of darkness, which you are. But this is the necessary stage that we talk about where you've abandoned your own false strength and as yet don't know the higher strength of God, of Truth. It's such a dreadful position to be in that few will enter it and I keep urging you over and over at these meetings to enter it yourself.
     Now, you're to watch your own mind and you're to see every day, from now on, how something scary and something dark enters into your own mind so that you tremble. That is all you're supposed to do for now. Out of every 100 thoughts, 99 of these thoughts go unobserved, which means all you can do is to be pained by them — to be tortured by them. You have chosen mental torment by your refusal to grow. Wouldn't you like to be so free that events don't turn into a problem? To be so wide-awake the event remains that, and not something to vibrate to.
     God, Truth, is the power to be able to see yourself in moment by moment operation and not say, "That is me." The minute the word "I" comes into it, you've wrecked it. You've gone right back to your mind and then you'll resort to intellectual devices to help yourself, which is no help at all, which is the way of the entire world.
     In conclusion, practice the following exercise, which leads to understanding. Exercise: Watch your thoughts all day long but don't join them. Know you are worried. Know you are afraid, etc. See it. Stand apart. Don't fall asleep and go into the second thought.
     Sacrifice everything to the invitation of Truth to understand your own mind, and God, who is higher than your mind, will do the rest.

THE ONLY ENEMY IN THE UNIVERSE
     When there's a pain, there is something you won't give up. The only enemy in the universe is your own unseen resistance. One of the weapons of dark forces is confusion. I have to get tough with the bums inside of me.

NEVER CRINGE AGAIN
     You know how entrenched within is the heavy morose conviction, idea, that everything in the world is stronger than you. They can batter you at will, trick you, fool you and take advantage of you.
     Yes, that is true. The world is a million times too much for you; knocks you down, torments you financially, romantically, sexually. The prince of this low world uses everything and nothing seems to stop it. That's the way you think now.
     Question: What are you doing living in this world? You have no business being here! That question should startle you. Know that you belong to God though this earth belongs to Satan. When you see wrong things in the world and are appalled, then remember God is in charge and rise above it.
     Never cringe again over anything that is happening out there. Stop loving to be scared. You enjoy it. It is not your place to correct what is happening in the world. Wake Up! The way you are now is contributing to what is happening. When are you going to stop letting the world drain you? This world will try to convince you it is your friend.
     God is here. Nothing bad can ever happen to one who is living with the Spirit of Truth.

LET GOD TAKE AWAY ALL SORROW
     Take this right step: It is not that other person or what's happening to this world, I am the problem to myself. Stick with that. The solution is where the problem is. There is no other enemy in the universe except your own inner wrongness. You worship your own wrongness instead of God. God wants to do one thing with you, which is to take away all sorrow. You side with Truth and let God take away all sorrow.

YOU ARE NOT THAT SUFFERING
     You’ve fallen for a trick. There exists in this universe a malicious force — sick, evil — that has deluded you into thinking suffering is necessary, that you have to suffer. You suffer because you're deceived completely. You are not that pain, suffering, negativity. Evil spirits want you to believe they are you and you are them.
     You have to give up your pain and suffering. False forces are something despicable living off of you. All you can do is think.

LOCATE THE INNER CASTLE
     Do this many times a day: Know you’re in the room. Drop thought. Notice your hands. Feel your feet on the floor. This is deliberately doing something to locate the inner castle. You must be obsessed to find it. Hard work. Don't work when it is easy. The secret room within means to keep experimenting with what it means to know “I am here” and do it often.

SPIRITUAL SANITY IS ALL YOU NEED
     I’m going to teach you to say knowingly, consciously, there is nothing I can do. And you’re not, you’re not, YOU ARE NOT allowed to put one ounce of despair into that statement. You’re not allowed to feel bad about saying there is nothing I can do. You’re to see it purely without you interfering with it. Without the old nature jumping up and saying, “Don’t say that! All is lost if you say I can’t do anything! You’re supposed to encourage yourself by saying I can do it.” And play the record over a thousand times a month. “I can do it, I can succeed, I can win!” That’s what insanity is and you’re going away from that.
     Ah, you go home. You write down on a piece of paper, very calmly, as if you were writing out a note to the mailman, or whatever. You write down THERE IS NOTHING I CAN DO. That is the pure fact that will rescue you, because the reason you can’t do anything is because you’re not there. You think you’re there. You’re not there. When you see there’s nothing you can do, that’s what giving up means.
     In connection with all this, you will understand perfectly how you live every day. I explained it a little bit. You go shopping, you go down to the shoe shop, or you go to the cafe. But you are not intruding on yourself; you are not going into false positions within. You’re staying wide awake knowing that you don’t have to get anything out of anything you can see with your physical eyes or hear with your physical ears. There is nothing in the time world for you so you can give up trying to get anything from it, something from it.
     And when the acquired, self-invented nature fades out through insight into its non-existence — as it fades out — oh, the rewards are uncountable, there are so many! And I’ve given you some of them. One of them is the absence of fear of the future. How can you fear something that doesn’t exist to you anymore? You have created a false existence in tomorrow and next year and five billion years from now. You’ve created an illusion, a delusion, and believe in that, and then you worry over it.
     Where there’s no you, there’s no future, there’s no worry. Now you’re living — and this is a good phrase — write this down, too. This is an excellent phrase because it puts both the mental world and the higher world together. This is the world that you now live in, and the only one you live in, THE WORLD OF SPIRITUAL SANITY.
     The world of spiritual sanity is the only thing you need.
     Come back...and we’ll all go for it together.

LET GO OF YOURSELF
     Poor sir, poor madam, how difficult it is for you to let go of yourself! Ah, the difficulty is authentic difficulty but we can do it. We're going to do it. There is no such thing as failure in this room. If you want to succeed — listen to this, this is an absolute promise — if you want to succeed it's as good as done.
     If you want to stay you, then go ahead home and live with you. I have nothing in common with you. I'm not going to go back to the old life.

REAL RELIEF
     Why have you given pain, suffering, confusion, authority over you? Why have you permitted them to continue to make you feel the way you do? This desperate feeling that you’ve got to do something, you’ve got to — listen to this — ask your desperate feelings, “Please give me calm feelings.”
     It would be just as ridiculous to be out in a boat in the middle of the crashing, thrashing stormy ocean to look up to the storm and ask it to suddenly become peaceful. It can’t. It won’t. So you’re wasting your time.
     But what you can do, instead of making plaintive pleas, is understand your mistake. Understand that you’ve been terribly tricked into calling on the wrong source for relief and rescue. You know you’re doing that, and I know it. I know and you know you’re always looking around for help, for answers. You’re always reading books, talking to friends. This is it, isn’t it? Isn’t it?
     You’re always trying to find relief from something that has never been given to you before. That is, you’ve never found relief before, but you keep trying. If you want to waste the rest of your life, you just sit out in that rocking boat with the water coming up into it; you just sit there and pray to the storm to stop being a storm.
     Salvation comes to the man or woman who simply remains the guilty and foolish and ridiculous and lost sinner that he is, that she is. I’m talking about salvation from time to where you can be delivered into eternity. Why are you lying to keep yourself lost? Why are you lying to keep yourself in time instead of dropping the lie and the time and going into eternity?
     You simply don’t understand the right method for being delivered. You’re to think about this a thousand times in the next week: There is nothing you can do. There is something you can realize, and what you can realize is there’s nothing you can do! If you do, if your present nature does anything, says anything, feels anything, reacts to anything, you’ll be a mile further out in the desert away from the oasis than you were today.
     All right, you either accept this or you reject it. You either want to understand or you don’t want to understand. Now it’s very clear of course that it's ninety-nine to one against you. One percent of you wants to understand. Ninety-nine percent doesn't. That’s okay. That’s fine. That one percent is enough. That’s all you need, because you can want to be on its side, instead of throwing the decision over to the ninety-nine percent, which wants to continue to destroy you.
     Yes, I am saying that it is the greatest necessity of your life to simply give up. Very calmly know that you’re lost. Ah, God doesn’t want you to have any answer at all. When you know you’re lost and there’s nothing you can do, then the helicopter comes over and sees you and rescues you. That’s symbolic of something higher than your own efforts.
     Now, this is something you should be very, very glad about — to know that you do have the power to choose which side you’re going to be on. But I’ll tell you, the big guns are going to open up on you. They’re going to try to blast you out of your little one percent position. You’re going to feel rage, guilt and every other feeling, and they’re going to try to tell you to hang on to them instead of letting them go. You let them go. And after going through new kinds of fears, you'll finally see that one percent grow to two percent, to three percent. And one day you’ll know from the Spirit of God himself that you crossed over, because you have cast your part on the side of God. And when you do that, he proves himself to you and will for all time.
What you dislike in that other person is still unconscious in yourself.

UNPOPULAR TRUTHS

TRUE TRANSFORMATION
     Nothing can touch you. Now I know how that sounds. I’m telling you the great mysteries, explaining the great mysteries of the ages that very few people can take into their lives, their deliverance, because they have decided on a single horrifying thing. They have decided, “I want to be me. There's nothing else but me. And I’m not going to let you take me away from me.”
     You’d better remember what I just said. If you do remember it, you have a chance because you’re getting to the very root of the whole matter of seeing why most people don’t make it. They have made an atrocious choice to not investigate why nothing is transformed inside themselves. They have chosen to believe that their nature, as it presently is, is all there is.
     I’m telling you, look for yourselves. See how defensive people are, how they put their hands up and push you away. And even when you try to correct them — they try to correct you!
     Now here’s a marvelous little exercise. Now do it! How many of you have ever been criticized for anything? Reprimanded? Corrected? Whatever. Now, you are to tell yourself what your first twenty reactions were when someone scolded you for misbehavior, and even if they corrected you in a kindly manner meaning to help you. I’m talking about the fixed habitual hardened egotistical response that you make when someone tells you that you did something you should not have done. You know very well in almost every case there is the reaction of “Who are you to tell me what to do? Leave me alone. Don’t you tell me what to do!”
     All right. You're going to do something different. You’re going to strike back at that false reaction. You’re going to do something marvelous so unlike you that it's going to shock your shoes off. Tie your shoes on well please.
     Picture yourself doing this when someone corrects you for anything at all and you know in your heart that they corrected you properly, not just wanting to get an egotistical thrill out of it. But you’re to do something different that will be a sword of righteousness forever. You’re corrected and you're watching your usual bitter angry remark as it starts to come up to your mind or to your mouth. And you’re going to see that it feels bad. It feels awful. It feels terrible to have a sour attitude of any kind.
     Now you know who the real enemy is. It isn’t that person who scolded you, who ridiculed you, who scoffed at you, who derided you for your mistakes. The enemy is you not seeing the enemy of whatever the actual state is. Now that proves that the enemy is nowhere but inside your own mind because you’re not being conscious of yourself. When you see the enemy, then the very knowledge of its presence — the identification of it — makes the right part of you want to not be a gullible victim anymore.
     This is the striking back! Truth, Reality, is striking back for you. Your perception, your insight, the new brightness in your mind — that is what is doing the work for you.

KNOW WHERE YOU ARE
     Know you’re seated in the living room. Be aware. By knowing where you are you can drive away all evil.
     Ladies, how to never again suffer in your relationship with a man: One of the most tormenting horrible anxieties that any human being has is the fear of making a mistake with another human being and being punished for it. You're afraid to open your mouth. Anytime a man threatens to leave you, say “Good-bye.” Then be aware of yourself having a cup of tea! I tell you it is very valuable to know you picked up that Scotch scone.

YOU ARE NOT MY THOUGHTS
     You’re not conscious that you do not create thoughts. You are not the creator of your own thoughts.
     I thought I manufactured thoughts, that I was a self-dependent factory. I am being bombarded by thoughts from two places. I am not the inventor of the two competing, opposing thoughts.
     Thoughts come into my mind. I am a free-willed agent who can select the heavenly thoughts or the thoughts coming from down there. I can decide whether I want thoughts from down there or up there.
     “I am personally responsible for looking downward or upward for my supply of thoughts. I am responsible for my own grief, confusion. I cause my life to be what it is.”
     God wants you to throw away your whole life. You chose to be influenced by hypocrites, etc., who get their thoughts from down there. You can select from up there.
     Notice how you have a tendency to instantly strike back. Notice the consistency of the someone-else method by criticizing, condemning, hating. God commands that you study very closely and consciously your own thoughts. Truth, Reality, wants you to notice your own thoughts and realize that they are not your own thoughts!
     Say a million times a day, YOU ARE NOT MY THOUGHTS.
     They want you to think they are so they can continue to destroy you. They know how to trick you into believing that their evil is your evil.
     You want to believe it because it tells you who you are. It gives you a false feeling of being the center of everything you can see about you. An evil thought gives you a sense of self — of “I am me!”
     You think the bad thought, calling it a good thought because you want to be you. You’re not your thoughts. Give up thinking that what you think constitutes a center from which you can operate. It has hurt you long enough. Who did you blame for your sorrow, troubles, etc.?
     If you won’t blame others for your sorrow, you will see where it’s coming from and then that will consciously destroy it.
     Your belief in yourself is what is making you sick and miserable — and sick and worried. Sense you are not who you think you are.

ATTENTION IS THE CURE
     Story summary: A king ruled with compassion. One day he rode out on his horse and fell and the king got amnesia. The king became a wanderer because he was unable to remember and operate from his kingly nature. He did not realize what had happened to him. There was no order, just anarchy and chaos. He suffered from it. He forgot where he came from. He didn't realize there was another place to live.
     Above all, listen for the call from the castle, from the heavenly world, to come back home. Don’t fall into imaginary spirituality. Your requests are for deliverance from your pain. NO! Suffering goes away only when you request to see the actual cause of your suffering. Your wandering mind is the cause of your suffering.
     You will pray in a new way with earnestness. Request to see through the charlatan-self that deceives you into wanting to be saved.
     The king listened right in the middle of despair, suffering. He was able to distinguish a deceitful ask for help from a true one.
     You must see the insincerity of your prayer. God answers true prayers the moment they are asked. Attention is the cure for a wandering mind. You will see self-deception. Persistent attention means to ask yourself, “What am I thinking about right now?” Know what you’re thinking right now — wasteful wanderings. Pay attention to what is happening right now.
     Attention, attention, attention all the time. Catch yourself visiting your dark caves.
     Keep bringing yourself back home all day today.